“... contact zone’. Das, however, is also interested in another monument in the same church: that of Lawrence Tanfield, his wife, Elizabeth Symondes, and ‘at the other end of the tomb, facing away from the rest of the family’ their disowned daughter, Elizabeth Tanfield Cary, viscountess Falkland. Elizabeth was married to the lord deputy of Ireland, and spent ...”

“... version of the Modernist dream has become real, with nightmarish results. The focus then shifts to Jackson Pollock, whose drip paintings become a variant of the dilemma that had faced Braque and Picasso: irreducible difference confronting anonymous identity, a dilemma restaged in a different key of agonised inquiry. Pollock, in turn, is followed by a ...”

“... American school of physics, worthy of the best in Europe. One of his partners in this was Ernest Lawrence, whose efforts to split the atom with his cyclotron were attracting a lot of publicity. But by the early 1930s, quantum physicists already knew that the atom could be split with less energy through ‘quantum tunnelling’ – the Russian physicist ...”

“... From the moment he announced his staff and cabinet appointments (Rahm Emanuel, Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates et al) it was clear that Obama meant to play by the same Washington rules that created the policy disasters he inherited from George W. Bush. Obama had retreated into politics as usual. He never looked back. One did ...”

“... writing a verse novel, it would seem, is to turn a blind eye to virtually all that Hardy, Joyce, Lawrence and their successors have done in prose. The result is a strange blend of racy, colloquial literary enterprise and static neo-Victorian values. Despite its neo-gothic title, The Haunted House betrays no hint of anachronism. Rebecca Brown explores a ...”

“... Meanwhile he was supposed to be studying English literature at Oxford, where he befriended T.E. Lawrence, whose wartime adventures Graves was to relate in a rather Boy’s-Own style in Lawrence and the Arabs (1927). In the early 1920s he and Lawrence planned their very own Boy’s Own ...”

“... Kingdom, the so-called Diplock Courts in Northern Ireland. In their study of those courts, John Jackson and Sean Doran suggest that the arrangement leads to an ‘adversarial deficit’ – the judge’s increased inquisitorial role changes the nature of the proceedings. Pressure is placed on defendants to refrain from contesting the prosecution case on its ...”

“... might verge on narrow-mindedness; the game might bore us. But the rulings were clear: by 1954, Jackson Pollock’s paintings were ‘forced’ and ‘dressed up’; Clyfford Still never left the minor league; Marcel Duchamp was a joker (not in a good way); Morris Louis painted as brilliantly as Raphael. In a 1959 essay, ‘The Case for Abstract Art’, he ...”

“... and of course there was the doubtless related matter of Housman’s sterile love for Moses Jackson, a friend and fellow undergraduate capable of inspiring the deep devotion of the young Housman but lacking any intention of responding in the manner desired. Moses Jackson was certainly important to the poetry, and I ...”

“... what will come next, and how soon. In New Orleans’s first hundred years, the period covered by Lawrence Powell’s The Accidental City, its existence was imperilled more than a dozen times. The first catastrophic flood occurred in 1719, less than a year after the site was claimed by French settlers. It was ‘the worst overflow the local Indians could ...”

“... is a tremendous biographical document with flashes of power. It has a striking portrait of D.H. Lawrence being foxy while Frieda gets on with her knitting. But as fiction it’s inert: tendril-waving and clumpingly spelled out. All psychologies underlined. Things said twice. What happened to the poet’s ear for tautology when she talks of someone as having ...”

“... Managing editor: Alfred Perles; society editor: Anais Nin; sports editor: Charles Nordon (aka Lawrence Durrell); butter news editor: Walter Lowenfels; department of metaphysics and metapsychosis: Michael Fraenkel; fashion editor: Earl of Selvage (aka Henry Miller); and Lawrence Durrell and William Saroyan as the ...”

“... automobiles and television. New names will appear: Clement Greenberg, Alfred Barr, Josef Albers, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon. All but the stodgiest departments – though this exempts many – will make gestures towards what has for the last thirty years been referred to, again tautologically, as ‘Theory’. Somewhere along the line, art ...”

“... immersion in it – as only a detailed biography such as this can show. Hardy was not, like Lawrence, continually engaged on his own bildungsroman: but the wry situations in the novels, the ironic plots behind the poems, are again and again found to have their roots in direct experience, observed or lived through; and the power of the best scenes in the ...”

“... continuously’ and drinking a lot; he got in fights, too, including one abortive dust-up with Jackson Pollock. Partly to escape urban temptation, Creeley, his wife, Ann, and their two young sons relocated in 1948 to a farm in New Hampshire, where he bred pigeons and poultry and tried to write. ‘I learned more about poetry as an actual activity from ...”